Pranks, Privilege, and Penn State

What an Instagram reel and a drug bust taught me about my own history, education, and complicity in systems I’m still working to unlearn.

So I was scrolling Instagram the other day, which I rarely do because I don’t understand Instagram and the algorithm doesn’t understand me, so my feed there is random and goofy. I’m really only on Instagram to spy on my kids, which is dumb because my kids barely use Instagram either, or when they do it’s on the account they use for “close friends,” which does not include their parents. I do not have a problem with this, because my kids are in their early twenties and in my opinion there are plenty of things that happen in one’s early twenties about which one’s parents should remain blissfully unaware.

In any case, I was scrolling Instagram and the algorithm had decided that what I needed that day was reels of standup comedians. (This was admittedly a nice distraction from the day’s onslaught of news about Republican voter suppression and how AI is on track to destroy the entire fucking planet within the next twelve to eighteen months.) One of the reels that popped up was Josh Johnson from The Daily Show; I always watch Johnson’s videos because that man is a comedic genius, and this bit was no exception. It was called “An Example of White Privilege” and Johnson was riffing on a news story I had missed in the onslaught: law enforcement in Pennsylvania had busted up a huge cocaine ring that was allegedly being run by a bunch of frat guys at Penn State.

If you also missed this story, the short version is that these dudes — all Penn State students, although one of their dads, a well-known local attorney in Pittsburgh, is also implicated — were (allegedly) bringing in absolute truckloads of cocaine from New York and Philadelphia, (allegedly) cutting and packaging it at a couple of Penn State frat houses, and then (allegedly) distributing it to their fellow Nittany Lions. Johnson’s take on this story zeroed in on the fact that when the cops busted into one of the frat houses to execute the arrests, one of the brothers — a fellow by the name of Thomas Robinson, who looks exactly like what you might imagine a fratty white dude at Penn State would look like — was initially convinced that the entire thing was a prank.

I would highly recommend watching Johnson’s bit on this because it really is comedic gold, but here’s the jist:

“…Two fraternities really had a whole cocaine ring that they were operating…and when they got raided, the cops came and one of the brothers, who was, like, a distributor himself, thought that the whole raid was a prank. We don’t have to go on and on about it or back and forth about it, but if you ever want to know what white privilege is… [at this point the audience loses its mind]… just, like the idea that the police show up where you live with guns, searching your room, and you’re like, ‘What is this, guys, WHAT? You’re kidding. You’ve got to be kidding’.”

This bit took me out. Part of it is Johnson’s performance — he is the master of the deadpan, wide-eyed delivery that manages to be both earnest and scathing at the same time — but most of it is the surgical precision of his analysis. White privilege is a slippery beast because it’s both invisible and everywhere, like the air we breathe, and Johnson not only caught the beast, he managed to handcuff it and frogmarch it into custody, much like the cops did to Thomas Robinson and his erstwhile brothers.

But the other reason this bit landed so hard with me is because it reminds me of an incident from my own past, one that I think about a lot as I wrestle with my own slippery beasts.

Some personal history: I grew up in one of Chicago’s most prestigious private schools. My school was very progressive pedogogically, very expensive financially, and very white demographically. I arrived as a precocious almost-four-year-old for what was called “junior kindergarten” and left at 17 with a high school diploma and the best education that money could buy.

Remembering the freedom we had to run amok in those days is both hilarious and terrifying and probably explains a lot about GenX generally. Starting in eighth grade, we were allowed to “sign out” of the building during our many free periods, which meant that at any given time a good chunk of the student body aged 13–18 was roaming the streets of Chicago like feral cats, with Sony Walkmen and Marlboro Lights and extremely questionable judgement in hand.

In retrospect, “extremely questionable judgement” was something of a theme. Our thrice-weekly assemblies, called “Morning Ex” in homage to the “morning exercises” of the school’s storied past, were largely student-planned, so the guest speakers brought in were occasionally eye-opening beyond what was entirely age-appropriate. My senior year, our class t-shirt was a celebration of the traditional senior hot-dog booth at the all-school carnival held every fall. The front of the shirt was a cartoon of Sleeping Beauty, napping, with the Prince looking down at her questioningly and the words WHEN A KISS WON’T DO… in a flowy cursive font; the back of the shirt showed a now wide-awake Sleeping Beauty holding a hot dog next to her mouth with a huge smile and the words …TRY A SENIOR WIENER! underneath in that same flowy cursive. [I know. I KNOW.] I have no recollection of any adult — a teacher, administrator, or parent — ever saying anything about this shirt except shaking their heads. I wore mine until it disintegrated, sometime in college.

All of this is context for the prank executed by the senior class, bless their hearts, in the spring of my sophomore year. This was a senior class with a capital-R Reputation for drinking, drugging, and general rule-breaking of all kinds even beyond the normal anarchy that was table stakes for feral teenagers in the mid-eighties (although reasonable people can disagree on how much of the Reputation was based in reality and how much was carefully curated gossip). The ringleaders of the class were a group of boys with enormous amounts of family money and a corresponding lack of sense who seemed — at least in my sophomoric, wide-eyed perspective — all-powerful and untouchable.

(These boys all bore a passing resemblance, perhaps not physically but definitely metaphorically, to our friend Thomas Robinson.)

The Morning Ex at which the prank took place began like all the others. Students and teachers lined up at the front to make various announcements about play rehearsal and the track meet and the bake sale and prom tickets. We ignored them and talked to our friends and were shushed.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the senior section, which was in the back right corner of the auditorium. Sophomores sat in the front section, so we all twisted around to see what was going on. A small knot of burly men in suits — one had a dark mustache and a brown check suit, a weird detail that I remember vividly — were stomping down the aisle waving badges and yelling about drugs and arrests and pushing their way into the senior seats. As we all sat there slack-jawed, the burly men grabbed three of the Ringleader Boys of Great Wealth and Little Sense, pulled them to their feet, twisted their arms behind their backs to handcuff them, and frogmarched them out of the seats, back up the aisle, and out the back door of the auditorium.

The room exploded. It was pandemonium. The seniors were screaming and waving their arms — an Oscar-worthy performance, really, since they all must have been in on it. A girl in my class, who was dating one of the handcuffed boys, was crying hysterically, almost hyperventilating. To this day, I don’t know if she was on it and just acting, or if she was truly surprised (and traumatized). The rest of us melted down completely.

I have no memory of the logistics of what happened next, but at some point it became clear that the entire thing was a meticulously planned joke: the seniors had flawlessly choreographed and performed a law-enforcement-flavored flashmob as their class prank. I do have a vague recollection of all of us tumbling out of the auditorium into the hallway and seeing the three boys standing there laughing and shaking hands with the small knot of burly men, who turned out to be off-duty CPD detectives. They had done it as a favor for one of the boys’ dads, a well-known local attorney.

We talked about nothing else for days. The whole escapade was considered a smashing success, so extremely clever and well-planned, the best senior prank in memory, maybe ever.

I made wonderful, lifelong friends at my school. I had incredible, brilliant, caring teachers, several of whom were guests at my wedding. And I learned a lot, a lot that was good and important. I learned how to think critically, how to write with clarity, how to read with curiosity, how to speak with confidence. I learned a lot about (white, western) literature and history and art and music and theater. I was at the time, and remain to this day, very aware of how lucky I was, and I’m enormously grateful in many, many ways to my school and how it shaped me.

But I also learned a lot of lessons at my school that I wasn’t aware I was learning at the time, lessons that have shaped my view of the world just as much as my (white, western) literature and history classes. I know now that those lessons, the ones about race and class and privilege and power and law enforcement and justice and accountability, aren’t really about individual behavior (or misbehavior). They are about being part of a system — an age-old system that was the oxygen of the rarefied air my classmates and I breathed but never acknowledged. The slippery beast that is both invisible and everywhere.

But I do understand, now, that it’s a system that I’m a participant in, and a perpetuator of, and those are the lessons that I will spend the rest of my life unlearning.

This essay originally appeared on The Politics Chicks Substack, where I write a weekly humor column.